Shadowburn, Carpe, most people had you two versus Jake and Linkzr as the main matchup. How do you rate Linkzr and Jake as a duo and how do you think you stack up against the other DPS duos in the league?Shadowburn: “They played really really well, we even were a bit surprised. They had a great level of coordination on Horizon, I was impressed. Jake’s Junkrat was on point.“Carpe: “Jake’s Junkrat is really good and Linkzr is like a Korean, really good!“

As much as it’s a Mercy meta right now, there is no doubt Zenyatta has a lot of impact in those teamfights. Can you give me some specific examples on how a high level Zenyatta adds value to a teamcomp?Boombox: “Zenyatta is mostly played, because the Orb of Discord is so good. When diving you do so much damage and also have opportunities to get right click picks. Also, a counter-play with Transcendence is better than Lucio ult.“neptuNo: “I think you can create a lot of space with Zenyatta, because you can push the back-line back and you make them use cooldowns. By having a Zenyatta you can also heal flankers from a big distance, with a lot of healers that’s not so easy.“

You guys missed the pre-season, so how did it feel like to finally be on stage and did you have any first-time jitters?Fragi: “We were a bit sad to have missed the pre-season, we missed getting experience. We also didn’t really practice together, we only had a few days with Carpe especially. So, we still have some problems we need to fix. I don’t know about the stage fright, at least I don’t have any. I don’t know about the other guys.” He looks over to his teammates, Poko is casually leaning back shaking his head… “I guess not, we are killers, professionals.“

On media day Rawkus had mentioned that especially about you ShaDowBurn, he would be able to read you pretty easily, because you played together for so long. Clearly that wasn’t the case, so how do you feel about it and have you changed anything since your time in FaZe?ShaDowBurn: “I didn’t change much, because we were not able to scrim a lot. So yeah I don’t know, I guess Rawkus just wasn’t able to do it.“

neptuNo, I don’t know if you remember, but on Oasis City Center there was a situation where ShaDowBurn had 5 HP and you soundbarrier’ed him to save that round. I was wondering if you could walk me through what the thought process is going into using Lucio ult, what are you looking for?neptuNo: “Most of the time I don’t want to waste my barrier, when everybody is full HP already, there is no point when they are not committing. So I was waiting for the enemy team to use some cooldowns or my team to be in trouble. And as soon as I feel my team is in trouble I press Q. I just want to make sure I get something for my ultimate.“

Boombox, you are pretty the only team UK player in the Overwatch League. And now that you have actually performed and won, what do you say to all your former team UK teammates and everyone in the UK that is supporting you from home?Boombox: “Well, I hope more players from the UK will get into the Overwatch League during the mid-season signings, there are some really good players out there. I think it is a good step for the UK esports scene, that is not really represented anywhere at the moment, so it’s nice to win a game on the highest level.“

Fragi, conventional wisdom says there isn’t much of a point to run a Reinhardt if you have dive-DPS. But you seem to be sneaking in the pick whenever you can, what is the thought process behind it?Fragi: “Well, I think I played Reinhardt with dive-DPS on Eichenwalde. On first point we like to run Reinhardt defense and I wanted to keep my Earthshatter on second point, that’s why I did it. We try to make it work in unconventional spots. It’s mostly about having a good playstyle with it, then it can work.“

A narrative about your team is: Because you haven’t had much practice, maybe expectations of your level of performance wasn’t as high as for other teams. I was wondering how much, as pro-players, this figures into your thinking or if the lack of expectations even allows you to play with much more freedom? And is there a slight advantage because other teams were not able to anti-strat you?neptuNo: “I think the loss on Horizon defense was because of the lack of preparation we had. So I think it hurts us a bit. But we knew overall we had the better players, so we were pretty confident in ourselves and we just tried to play as a standard team. The synergy between the DPS duo and Fragi was really good, Fragi got used to them really quickly in those 2 days. That said, we can get much better. We expected to win 3-1, we didn’t think we would lose Eichenwalde, but we knew our Horizon is really bad, because we didn’t have time to prepare and teams play Orisa and stuff we never played against there.“Fragi: “Going into the first week our expectations were quite modest, but we definitely wanted to win, we were pretty confident about that game especially. But still, I think we all have big potential and it can only get better from here.“

On reddit, there was some footage going around from the Philadelphia Fusion viewing party with all the balloons and search lights. How does it feel to strike such a big victory on your first time in OWL in front of such a hyped crowd?Fragi: “Yeah, I was really surprised there was such a big interest back in Philli. Of course I am really happy about that, really happy we won for them, so yeah: go Philli!“